Soviet sodomy law

The 1917 revolution scrapped the tsarist penal code, and from the 1918 draft criminal code of the Left Socialist Revolutionary justice commissar Isaac Steinberg onwards consensual same-sex relations were left out of it. The draft of 1920, under Commissar Kursky, did the same. Drawing on the code of the French Revolution and the principles of secularisation and medicalisation, this line became the RSFSR criminal codes of 1922 and 1926, at a time when Britain and Germany still prosecuted homosexuals.

Health Commissar Semashko and Grigory Batkis, in contact with Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science, presented the repeal as a deliberate measure. But the codes of southern republics such as Azerbaijan, Georgia, Abkhazia, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan punished sodomy as a “backward custom”, and in the show trials of priests during the anti-religious campaign accusations of homosexuality were used as “survivals of the old way of life”. In the late 1920s homosexuality was labelled an illness, and in 1928 Batkis and others repudiated their earlier views.

In August and September 1933 the OGPU arrested several hundred men in Leningrad, Moscow and Kharkov. On 15 September its deputy chairman Genrikh Yagoda reported to Stalin that an “association of pederasts” was turning into spy cells and corrupting youth and the armed forces. Stalin passed it to Kaganovich: “The scoundrels must be punished in exemplary fashion, and a corresponding guiding decree introduced into legislation.” Kalinin preferred extrajudicial handling by the OGPU to a law, but the Politburo approved Yagoda’s draft on 16 December, and decrees of the Presidium of the Soviet Central Executive Committee of 17 December 1933 and 7 March 1934 told the republics to add the new article.

The propaganda war over the Reichstag arsonist Marinus van der Lubbe formed part of the background. The Nazis cast him as a communist terrorist. In reply, The Brown Book of the Reichstag Fire and Hitler Terror, published in Paris in August 1933 by exiled communists including Willi Münzenberg, claimed that he was a male prostitute procured for Röhm by Röhm’s aide Georg Bell, and that the fire was set by a clique of homosexual stormtroopers led by Edmund Heines; there was no evidence for this. To distance itself from van der Lubbe, the Comintern used aggressively homophobic rhetoric, calling him a Nazi collaborator sexually dependent on Röhm, and this may have influenced the Soviet stance. According to the historian Dan Healey, in January 1934 military counter-intelligence in Leningrad, investigating local homosexuals, claimed to have seized a document titled “Open letter of the homosexuals of Moscow and Kharkov to Mr. Marinus van der Lubbe”. Later historians strongly suspect it was fabricated, but at the time it served as evidence that an international of homosexuals, the so-called “Homintern”, was anti-Soviet.

Ukraine was the first to adopt the new article, on 11 January 1934. The RSFSR added Article 154-a to its criminal code on 1 April.

Article 154-a. Sexual intercourse of a man with a man (sodomy) is punished by deprivation of liberty for three to five years.

Sodomy committed with the use of violence or by taking advantage of the victim’s dependent position is punished by deprivation of liberty for five to eight years.

154-а. Половое сношение мужчины с мужчиной (мужеложство) — лишение свободы на срок от трёх до пяти лет.

Мужеложство, совершённое с применением насилия или с использованием зависимого положения потерпевшего, — лишение свободы на срок от пяти до восьми лет.

When the British communist Harry Whyte wrote to Stalin asking for the Marxist grounds of the law, Stalin wrote on its first page: “Archive. An idiot and a degenerate.” Gorky’s “Proletarian Humanism” in Pravda and Izvestia on 23 May 1934 spread the saying “Destroy the homosexuals and fascism will disappear”. In 1936 Justice Commissar Krylenko called homosexuality a product of the moral decay of the exploiting classes.

The diplomat Dmitry Florinsky and the musicologist Boris Przybyszewski were sentenced under it in 1934 and shot as spies in 1937, and in 1939 it was among the charges against Yezhov. In the Gulag men sent down under it fell into the most despised caste.

The new RSFSR code of 1960 kept the offence as Article 121, dropping the minimum sentence.

Article 121. Sodomy. Sexual intercourse of a man with a man (sodomy) is punished by deprivation of liberty for up to five years.

Sodomy committed with the use of physical violence or threats, or with a minor, or by taking advantage of the victim’s dependent position, is punished by deprivation of liberty for up to eight years.

Статья 121. Мужеложство. Половое сношение мужчины с мужчиной (мужеложство) наказывается лишением свободы на срок до пяти лет.

Мужеложство, совершённое с применением физического насилия, угроз, или в отношении несовершеннолетнего, либо с использованием зависимого положения потерпевшего, наказывается лишением свободы на срок до восьми лет.

Convictions under it rose by 40 per cent between 1960 and 1970, and it was also used against dissidents such as Sergei Parajanov. Estimates of the men convicted range from 25,000 to 250,000, with 60,000 the figure most often given. The article was repealed by a Russian federal law of 29 April 1993, in force from 27 May, when Yagoda’s and Stalin’s papers and Whyte’s letter were declassified.